Cans are used by many beverage manufacturers to package their product. Much of the manufacturing process of filling the cans with the appropriate beverage is automated, requiring conveyer belts to move the cans from place to place throughout the plant. At each point of the manufacturing process all of the unfilled cans must have the same orientation; the open ends must all face the same direction and the closed ends must face the opposite direction. The unfilled cans are usually very light in weight, thus as the cans are conveyed along, some are inevitably jostled off of the conveyer belt and onto the floor. These jostled or fallen cans have not only lost their place in the manufacturing process but their correct orientation as well. In order to reload the fallen cans back into the system, the original orientation must be restored; the open ends must all face the same direction. Reloading the cans into the manufacturing process is rarely done as a practical matter, even though normal can losses may amount to around 5% of the total number of cans, which in a large plant may mean thousands of cans every day, because reloading by either manual or automatic means is not cost effective. Instead of reloading, the cans are thrown away.
The prior art utilizes a base structure having the shape of a rounded projection onto which a can of random or scrambled orientation is dropped end first. Once the can is dropped onto the base structure, it quickly loses its balance and falls off. If the open end happens to be on top, the can slides off of the base structure in one direction. Conversely, if the closed end is on top, the can slides off in the other direction. Can unscramblers of the prior art have proven to be unreliable for several reasons. Control of the can is lost since the can is dropped and allowed to free fall one way or the other. The can may bounce off of the base structure in the wrong direction, or it may not land on the base structure correctly. Typically, once the cans have fallen off of a conveyer belt, they are washed before being reloaded into the manufacturing process. Any water that remains inside of a can after the washing process tends to alter the balance and cause a can to slide off in the wrong direction.
The apparatuses of the present invention as disclosed herein are particularly useful in the aluminum can industry. Aluminum cans are used extensively throughout the beverage industry, in lieu of steel cans, for economic reasons. Aluminum cans are typically two piece cans, having a cylindrical can body with open and closed ends, and a can top which is fitted onto the open end of the can body after the can body has been filled with the appropriate contents. Aluminum cans differ from comparable steel cans in several respects, notably fragility and ferrousness. A uptopped aluminum can body is much more fragile than an untopped steel can, particularly near the open end portion of the can body. The side wall of an aluminum can body has a thickness averaging only 0.006 inches. Furthermore, unlike steel cans, aluminum cans are nonferrous, rendering magnets useless as against aluminum cans. Therefore, much of the conventional can handling equipment that has been developed for steel cans is unsuitable for handling aluminum cans.